A Lamp Made From Saigon's Sky: Vietnamese Brand BằNG and the Dreamy Lớp
Inspired by an iridescent sky over Saigon, this Vietnamese table lamp swept design media in April and won New York's People's Choice award in May. Behind it, a Vietnamese contract factory hatching a brand of its own.
[A Lamp Made From Saigon's Sky: Vietnamese Brand BằNG and the Dreamy Lớp]
One May afternoon — before any of this made news — an iridescent cloud appeared over Saigon. Sunlight was diffracting through high-altitude ice crystals or water droplets, scattering into a wash of shifting color, the kind of sight that usually dissolves within tens of seconds. Thomas Bình-Minh Vincent, a French designer living in Ho Chi Minh City, happened to look up.
He turned those few seconds into a lamp.
The lamp is called Dreamy Lớp, and it has been doing the rounds on social media for a while — unboxing and review videos keep popping up on TikTok, and a Taiwanese design account on Threads greeted it with "so this is that viral sunset lamp." From early April this year, Yanko Design, My Modern Met, and designboom covered its launch in quick succession; in May it won the People's Choice at the NYCxDESIGN Awards, run by the American design magazine Interior Design. The Lớp collection it belongs to already sells at New York's MoMA Design Store and the Centre Pompidou boutique in Paris. The brand behind it, BằNG, was founded only in 2021.
The lamp is a matte opal glass sphere suspended between layers of transparent acrylic, the layers held at even gaps by polished stainless-steel spacers. Switch it on and the sphere's reflection lands on every layer — a perfectly still object that seems to have something slowly moving inside it. The Dreamy edition's acrylic also changes color. The material is dichroic; the hue drifts with your viewing angle and the light, cool blue from one side, warm gold from another, with rainbow-toned shadows spilling onto walls and floors. Vincent's own line: "Dreamlike silhouette by day. Chromatic geometry by night."
Lớp is BằNG's signature lighting collection — the name means "layers" in Vietnamese, and every lamp in it is a variation on the sphere-between-layers form described above. It debuted in 2023 and comes in four sizes and eight acrylic colors, plus a stainless-steel edition with each layer hand-polished to a mirror finish; Dreamy is the newest color to join, priced from 295 to 735 USD on the US site. What Vincent originally wanted to make was just an image: something floating inside something else. As the sketches piled up, the image became a sphere hovering between layers of clear acrylic. The sphere is matte opal glass on purpose — if it were clear too, the whole lamp would blur together, and you would lose the sense of one thing floating inside another.
The lamp went on to win the Archiproducts Design Award (2023), the American PRIZE award for modern furniture and lighting (2024), and a Winner title in the lighting category of the German Design Award (2025).
Vincent is French. He came to Vietnam in 2016 and joined Elek, a factory that manufactures LED lighting and furniture for international clients, starting as an intern and working his way up to management. In November 2021, he founded BằNG with Elek's CEO, Marc Bregeault: a consumer-facing design brand that sits inside Elek, with a team of eight.
The brand takes its name from the Vietnamese preposition bằng — the "of" in "made of": làm bằng tay is handmade, làm bằng sắt is made of steel. Vincent has a line he likes to repeat: "design ain't no office job." Design should happen on the production floor, not at a desk — which is why he moved to Vietnam in the first place.
The temperament goes back to childhood. His parents worked office jobs but could never sit still at home — building a wooden terrace, laying tiles, fixing his bicycle — and he was pulled in from a young age. At eight, having noticed he liked making things, they sent him to an art workshop to mess around with paint, clay, and papier-mâché. He has kept the habit ever since: mornings at the computer, afternoons in the workshop.
That workshop sits inside Elek's plant in Dĩ An — part of Bình Dương province until last July, when it was folded into Ho Chi Minh City. Five thousand square meters, five workshops, more than thirty makers, with BằNG's design studio right inside — design and production under one roof, which is exactly what the brand's tagline "from factory to your space" is about.
The lamps come as kits you assemble at home: no special tools needed, repairable when they break, easier to recycle when they are done. Buyers have found their own uses for it — some slip a vinyl record between the layers, and small-apartment dwellers use the lamp as a mini display shelf.
Vincent says his favorite thing about BằNG is how it surprises people: when Europeans and Americans think of Vietnam, they picture weaving, bamboo, rural craft. "That's beautiful, of course, and we want to show another side, a more vibrant, industrial, and contemporary Vietnam."
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